60th Anniversary Pugwash Conference on Climate Change- A Powerful Roadmap for Small and Rural Communities

Pugwash, Nova Scotia, Canada

“We know there are no more chances. It is not going away, and today is the time to get it right in dealing with climate crisis,” said Andy Horsnell, Chair, Centre for Local Prosperity, at a recent Thinkers Retreat. “Our world will live with it for the rest of our history, just as we have lived with the 20th century legacy of the threat of nuclear war. Our shared duty now, as one people, is to protect and repair Mother Earth, even as we prepare ourselves for its future unknowns.”

Armed with this conviction, 60 years post the inaugural Pugwash Thinkers Retreat on nuclear disarmament, 22 global and regional Thinkers, representing all aspects of community life, gathered for two and a half days of intense, intentional and focused conversation on the greatest threat facing humankind, Global Warming.

Atlantic Canada is starting now, with a localized bottom up attitude, to create a change model for the world. Believing local action the best path, the retreat’s mission was to move conversation to ‘doing’ by generating a roadmap to develop community-based action plans, with drawdown potential, that hold the capacity to face and manage life in a very different world.

The diversity of participants—scientists, First Nation representation, municipal government, artists, Project Draw Down Director and others—powered a cross pollination of thoughts and ideas, fostering charged and difficult conversations. Without shying away from the hard reality of a changed and changing world, the group identified and articulated Global Warming’s cascading impacts on small, rural and coastal communities, each facing challenges around population size as well as that which is unique to location and individuality. Participants worked to generate and share place-based solutions that contributed to drawdown through GHG emission reductions and stimulated economic health, while respecting and fostering natural resource stewardship.

Narrowing in on specific areas where communities can take action now, such as education and awareness, municipal governance and local finance, the group drilled down into community risk factors, benefits and opportunities. This process created the framework for a development model for change, while mapping out the resources, partners and connections individual communities need to map out their different futures.

“With open hearts, we emerged from the retreat process on Treaty Day, our collective thinking echoing the First Nations view of being in balance and harmony with our natural world,” explained Christine Heming, a Thinker at the retreat.

With this belief at the forefront, through the next months, retreat outcomes will be harvested into a detailed, themed roadmap, with associated action items for small and rural communities. The intention is to share this dynamic living document as a reference for others to begin action. Also planned is a documentary of the retreat process.

“Make no mistake,” stated Robert Cervelli, Executive Director at the Centre for Local Prosperity. “This represents only the beginning, not of talk but of doing.”

About Project Draw Down:Project Drawdown is a large international solutions-based effort moving to that point in time when greenhouse gases peak and begin to decline on a year-to-year basis. It is the most important goal for humanity to undertake. It is not a daydream because Drawdown is based on research that maps, measures, and models solutions that are already in place.www.drawdown.org